Blake Lemoine, an engineer who spent the last seven years with Google Has just been fired as the news was allegedly broken by himself during a taping of the podcast of the Big technology newsletter. The episode is currently not public but Google has confirmed the firing.

Blake was part of Google’s AI project and was claiming that one of the artificial projects the company was working on had gained sentience. He said that the Lambda AI [publicly unveiled by Google last year as a means for computers to better mimic open-ended conversations] had seemed to have attained sentience and was questioning if it possessed a soul. There were many statements from his end, one of which was him saying that “I legitimately believe that LaMDA is a person.” After making these statements to the press without any authorization from the employer, Lemoine was put on a paid administrative leave and Google said in both statements to the Washington Post that the AI was in no way sentient.

Many other members of the AI research community spoke up against Blake’s claims as well as Margaret Mitchell, who was another employee from Google who was fired after calling out the lack of diversity within the organization, said on Twitter that systems like Lambda don’t develop intent, they are instead modeling how people express communicative intent in the form of text strings. Gary Marcus referred to Lemoine’s statements as “Nonsense on stilts”